He Says, She Says: Wayne’s World

My boyfriend Jonathan and I both love movies (thankfully!), but we’ve found that even though we have fairly similar tastes a lot of time, we’ve each seen a lot that the other hasn’t, simply due to what we’ve been exposed to over the years. So we’ve been taking turns choosing movies that mean a lot to us for the other one to watch. We thought it would be fun to share some of this journey, covering both our viewpoints – why the person choosing the film likes the film and thought the other should see it, and what the person who hadn’t seen the film before ended up thinking about it. I wouldn’t count on us doing it for EVERY film we get each other to watch, but we’ll try to for a good portion of them, starting with this one.

He Says…

There are a few films out there that have shaped my sense of humor into what it is today. I’ll quote them without hesitation and many of their gags will make way into conversation without me even thinking about it. In college, if one of us started talking about any of these movies, the rest of us would begin barking quote after quote to try and get the other laughing. I can’t count how many times we would mimic John Cleese talking about the terrors of that evil rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail or how many times we’d try and out-quote each other from Mystery Men. But it was one film that stood out among the others in terms of defining my sense of humor, rising above the rest in quotability and being able to match my silly outlook on life; and after the fourth or fifth time I quoted Wayne’s World to Jandy without her having any idea what I was talking about, I decided it was time to share.

It’s difficult to pick one thing to like about this film; there’s so much fun to be had. The humor here is self-aware, something that I immediately take a shine to. There’s a scene in particular where Wayne and Garth tell Rob Lowe’s character that they won’t bow to corporate sponsorship, all the while being advertisements themselves. The humor is also kind of abstract, making references that not everyone my age might necessarily get. For example, there’s a scene where our heroes re-create the opening to Laverne and Shirley which gets me laughing every single time I see the film. Garth interrupts it fairly quickly to get us back to the plot at hand, which goes back to that whole “self-aware” thing. Absolute gold.

And furthermore, Wayne and Garth keep from falling into the “idiot” stereotype that plagues other buddy films (Dumb and Dumber being perhaps the most prevalent example). I tend to like my buffoonery laced with a bit of smarts and this film does it plenty. There’s a scene fairly early on where Wayne tries to woo chick-rocker Cassandra with his rather quick adoption of Cantonese. The interchange is hilarious and I usually “lose my shit” when he stops talking and lets the subtitles continue for him.

I could go on and on with this film, citing moment after brilliant moment, but I think you get the idea. What made it fun this time around was watching Jandy’s reaction to the film. None of the jokes or references were lost on her and it was kind of awesome to realize that we share much in the way of humor. It was also nice to be able to give Jandy some context to my overall silliness.

Jonathan’s Flickchart ranking: 82 out of 1174

She Says…

There are a lot of early ’90s films I missed because I was too busy watching classic films – I say that neither as an excuse nor out of elitism, but purely as a fact. Thus there are a lot of films like Wayne’s World that all my peers just assume I’ve seen, and Jon is slowly but surely helping me make sure I get around to them. I actually had written Wayne’s World off as a stupid comedy of the sort that I don’t really like – along with Dumb and Dumber, which we watched a few months ago and I enjoyed decently enough, but isn’t really my style. In fact, I had those two so closely associated in my head that my first thought when Jon suggested we check out Wayne’s World next was “will I like it more or less than Dumb and Dumber?” He assured me I would like it a lot more, and he apparently knows me well, because I really liked, borderline loved this movie.

I’d seen a couple of the skits on SNL, so I had a little bit of an idea of the cable-access show premise, though the film does quite a nice job of fleshing that out with a corporate buy-out plot with a smarmy Rob Lowe trying to cash in on Wayne and Garth’s youth demographic appeal. That’s all pretty predictable. But what makes the film so much fun is the devil-may-care attitudes of Wayne and Garth themselves, more intent on partying on and enjoying their lives (even when that consists of nothing more than hearing a band at the local club or playing street hockey in between passing cars) than anything else, and the extreme level of self-awareness the film displays. Wayne and Garth are constantly talking and mugging directly to the camera, even to the point that when another character starts giving his life story, Wayne pulls him aside, warning him that only he and Garth are allowed to talk to the camera. Other times, the pair tell Lowe in no uncertain terms that they’ll never sell out for sponsorship, while eating Pizza Hut, drinking Pepsi, and wearing Reebok apparel. It’s quite obvious there, but it’s still funny, simply because it’s so shameless about the jokes it’s going for.

I also loved how these apparently dumb and aimless characters would suddenly start saying incredibly smart and learned things. Like when Wayne learned enough Cantonese to speak to Cassandra using big words and advanced concepts, and Garth knew how to reroute the satellites to get Cassandra’s band a big audition. Of course there’s nothing truly believable here, but the film takes that and runs with it, even giving three different endings with Wayne and Garth choosing which one to show next. This is my type of fun – very meta, very knowing, playing on expectations in really unusual and interesting ways, while never really being false to the characters of Wayne and Garth as initially set up. Several of the scenes or lines were familiar to me, through cultural osmosis, I guess. It was great to see where they came from and enjoy them in context – as much context as anything in Wayne’s World has. And yeah, I see what Jon means when he cites this film as being really influential on his sense of humor. Lots of the jokes he makes are obviously in this vein. :)

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This is a cool concept, and I’m looking forward to checking out more of these posts. I also have some obvious movies that it seems like everyone has seen but me, and it’s cool to hear different perspectives on the picks. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Wayne’s World, and I’d like to check it out again at some point. It can remind me of a time when Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey were still in their primes career-wise.

Yeah, they were both fantastic in this. It was great seeing just how absurd and ridiculous the movie could get without ever compromising their essential characters.

There should be a good bit of variety in the series, too, just based on some the picks I know we have for each other, so I’m looking forward to what all else we end up showing each other. Some of them will likely be more obscure than this one – this has just been a particularly big blind spot for me for a while, and he couldn’t stand it anymore. :)

What Jandy said. I tend to quote these kinds of films rather often, this being no exception. After a bit of this I decided it was time to have her sit down and watch. Now she’ll totally get the context when I say “Schyeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt!” :)

Oh wow. Yeah, definitely missing out there. In fact, I should probably add Pee Wee’s Big Adventure to the list of films that define my sense of humor (post may or may not be in the works). That would fall under the kind of Tim Burton I enjoy watching. Would be cool if he went back to stuff like Pee Wee. :)

Sorry about the weirdness in the comment threading, guys. I’m trying different levels of threading because when the thread gets too deep, it looks pretty crappy. Not sure I’ve found the right solution yet.

I gave up with mine and made it completely flat. I couldn’t stand how deep the threading would go and how when you restricted the threading you couldn’t reply to the last comment after a certain point. =/

It’s not too bad with one level of threading if you have it set to “oldest first.” I had it set to “newest first” and that was really bizarre. I changed the default to “oldest first,” so we’ll see how it goes. I like keeping threads to some degree, but they don’t need to be nested that deeply, I don’t think.

This movie came out during the era when I first became an SNL viewer, so I was naturally quick to want to see it. I actually caught it during its theatrical run and I loved it then. It hit me in pretty much the same way as Jon, only I never really had anyone around me who loved it as much as me so I couldn’t really trade quotes from it with anyone.

That said, I did introduce it to some of my friends one night in high school. We got into the habit of staying up late on Friday nights with a triple feature. One night, I picked our lineup and made it a double feature (because of the run times): Doctor Zhivago and Wayne’s World. We started sometime around 11:00 PM, I guess. I suppose, without knowing you two even existed, that it was in a lot of ways a truly Jon & Jandy Double Feature! I recommend that pairing, by the way, and I think Jandy will discover that Wayne’s World is one of those movies that actually becomes more enjoyable with subsequent viewings.

On a side note–and I did tweet a pic of it to Jandy when I saw she had ranked this on Flickchart–several years ago, I bought this: http://t.co/s3zkfz14 almost entirely because of my enjoyment of this movie.

Doctor Zhivago and Wayne’s World seems like a really WEIRD pairing to me! :) What made you think of them together? Hopefully you played _Wayne’s World_ second.

And LOL on the drag Bugs Bunny. I’d heard that line before, too, wondering if someone else was attracted to Bugs Bunny in drag, but I don’t think I knew where it came from. Great to finally get some of these references!

To be honest, I selected Zhivago because my friends had never seen it and I was on a David Lean kick at the time. I can’t recall now the order in which we watched them, but we did the Big Three (the others being The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia). We started with Zhivago, in large part because of its run time and the importance of being able to be attentive throughout. Wayne’s World seemed like a nice bit of levity to chase the somber Zhivago.

Well, I think I kind of got lucky in terms of the people I was able to see the movie with. It helped that we were a bunch of bored college students in North Dakota with nothing to do but drink and watch movies. I had roommates once that would go ballistic over The O.C. and One Tree Hill, and then turn around and watch Mallrats or in one case introduce me to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Fair enough. Lawrence of Arabia will always be my favorite Lean film, I think. Zhivago‘s okay, but not nearly as good as LoA. And the programming “rule,” as I understand it from rep cinema programmers I know, is to always do the shorter and/or funnier film second out of a double feature. I’ve been to some double features they programmed backwards for some reason, and it is way harder to sit through a drama after having just seen a comedy.

Many of my classic film blogger buddies are already at TCM Film Fest RIGHT NOW – I won’t be able to get there until Friday night, but in the meantime, here’s my preview post at Flickchart that runs down some of the films easily available to watch at home if you’re not able to go to the fest, and some films that aren’t easily available at all to whet your interest in making it to the fest next year. Hope to see you this year or a future one!

I need to do better about cross-referencing the stuff I write elsewhere in this little “elsewhere” column. That’s what it’s here for! I’m continuing to write TCM programming guides every month at the Flickchart blog (April’s will be…soon…I’m behind), and managing the Decades series, where we look back at films celebrating decade anniversaries this year.

For April, we looked back 90 years to 1927, a watershed year in the history of cinema with the exploding popularity of sound films, but also possibly the height of silent film artistry. All of the films featured in the post are silent (The Jazz Singer did not make Flickchart’s Global Top Ten), and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Check it out!

Video essayist Kogonada tends to let images and editing speak for themselves, and that’s precisely what he does here (with a slight bit of added Godard-esque typography, mostly to translate French audio), juxtaposing shots from various 1960-1967 Godard films to highlight recurring techniques. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who watches Godard’s early work that he had some specific things on his mind, but seeing it put together like this with excellent music and editing choices is mesmerizing and wonderful.

Chuck Jones is by far my favorite animation director of all time, and Tony Zhou is currently my favorite video essayist. Put them together? Yep, this is nine must-see minutes right here. And I’m also reminded that I need to get back to my Looney Tunes series that I started months ago and seemingly abandoned – but I didn’t, I promise! It’s just delayed.

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939’s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”